Variety reports that Pan Nalin has signed on to direct Buddha, the story of Siddhartha, sometime next year. No details yet on how this film will approach the material, but I imagine it won’t be the sort of Sunday School lesson we got in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1993) — a film that I remember finding so-so at best, though I loved the soundtrack albums and used to listen to them quite often. Anyway, the reason I imagine Nalin will take a somewhat different approach is because possibly his best-known film to date, Samsara (2001; my comments), is itself critical of certain aspects of the Buddha legend, or at least of the way it has been told.
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